Recently, I was having quiet drinks with friends when after
a little while, two girls came and asked if they could sit at our table. Looks wise,
on a scale of 1 to 10, one of them was about a 6. I’d had a few beers which
bumped her number up a little so of course, I let them take the seat. Her mate
was about a 0/1. She looked vaguely like this...
A huge amount of alcohol was needed to help
her looks.
So of course I cracked on to the more attractive one of the
two. Running my game for a little while as the drinks flowed. At one point the
more attractive one gets up to use the washroom. She had to walk around to my
side of the table to get there. She took the opportunity to whisper in my ear “I
like you. I think we should be friends on facebook” That was a weird thing to
say, I thought, as she slipped me her business card. She continued “...and by
the way, my friend thinks your cute” Suddenly fear shot through my body. This
was not what I was expecting, nor what I had planned.
My attitude had completely changed by the time the girl had
got back from the washroom. I showed disinterest to them both and started
acting slightly anti-social. Panic started to kick in when the more attractive
girl left the bar in a taxi, leaving her ugly mate with me and my friends. Oh
no, what had I got myself into now?
Embarrassingly she started to act flirty toward me in front
of my friends. A particular low point for me was when my friends tried
distracting her. Whilst she pretended to listen to
them talk she rubbed her foot up and down my leg until finally finding my crotch. I
felt a tingle, well, more of a shiver down my spine. I had to stop this.
Eventually my friends gave up trying to distract her and we
went back into our own conversation. She asked me a simple question ‘So what’s
your perfect girl?’ I suddenly saw an opportunity to end this nonsense so I had
to pick my words carefully. With a straight face and totally deadpan I answer “One that can take a punch”
Now,
I can’t tell you whether it was the Jaeger bombs she kept
buying me or my endless quest for self amusement that made me say this. What I
can tell you is I don’t really believe in hitting girls and that’s what this
ridiculously long introduction has been leading up to.
I’ve not been in many fights in my life. The ones I have
been in also barely count as fights. My
first was when I was eleven. I watched my friend get beaten up in a park by a
kid called James, who used to practice judo. I watched my friend get knocked
over and punched time and time again until I couldn’t watch anymore. I stepped
in to help him out only to get taken to the ground myself. I distinctly
remember watching my friend running into the distance crying as James sat on my
head.
My next fight, aged
thirteen, a friend and I were play wrestling on his front lawn. A kid that used
to bully me at school was walking past, came over and joined in. Of course, he
started to get rough and it soon ended up in a real fight. I was all over him,
despite his friend shooting at me with a potato gun.
Another time I had
got into a little argument with some lippy kid called Billy. He was always
starting fights with people as his brother was supposed to be one of the
toughest in my school. We tussled on the pavement not really hurting each other
until I ended it by hitting his head against the curb. He ran off crying but
soon found me later that day with a huge group of his mates. I was climbing a
tree with my friends when they all showed up. Of course my friends got out of
the tree and walked away leaving me to fend for myself. (There seems to be a theme here?) Billy and
all his mates waited for me at the bottom of the tree until his tougher, older
brother turned up. Billy explained the story to his brother, I was convinced I
was going to get my head kicked in. That was until the brother told Billy “Good,
you’re a little prick and you deserve it”
The last fight I ever had was my most humiliating. When I
was fifteen I took up boxing. I loved it
and took to it like a duck to water. After a few weeks of training they started
to let me spar. I loved that too. The majority of other kids they put me up against I
dominated. This is until they put me up against a girl that had been training
at the gym for years. Despite my little joke about hitting women, I really do
hate it and was quick to protest against it to my trainer. He didn’t want to
hear it and talked me into getting into the ring with her. The sparring match
started and we both put our guards up. She edged toward me, I stood rooted to
the spot. I really didn’t feel comfortable hitting her so I did the next best
thing and just tried to dodge every punch she threw. Not an easy thing to do
when you’re not so agile and you’re a rookie fighting somebody so experienced.
After a few minutes of this girl raining punches on me the
trainer stopped the sparring match out of pity.
I was quick to leave the ring, I just wanted to bury my head in the
sand. She was quite humble about it, I was surprised. That is until the next day, when I
discovered she had told her mates and word had spread around the whole school.
You can imagine the abuse I got for that.
It took a long time
to live that one down.
